Leia em português

IVIDES DATA™ hosts the fifth session of 2026 OSM Workshop and launches an ebook on creating web maps with uMap

 

Front cover of the ebook A short guide to create web maps with uMap. Source of image and map data (c) 2026 OpenStreetMap contributors, uMap, and authors.

 

PREVIEW OR DOWNLOAD EBOOK (7.8 MB)

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Resources for creating web maps with uMap were presented during the fifth session (in portuguese): project creation and configuration, creation of static and dynamic layers, label customization, clustering and heatmaps. This event is part of the 2026 OSM Workshop Series (translation), organized by IVIDES DATA™ in partnership with the Institute of Geosciences at State University of Campinas - Unicamp (São Paulo, Brazil).

 

The files used in the fifth session can be found in the VIDEO DESCRIPTION

 

All content is available on the LEARNING PORTAL.

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It is a very rare moment, when somebody made a new JOSM tool, that must become one of main tools in you palette, like Building Tools or RelToolBox.

Meet Fillet Tools plugin. It will completely replace Fastdraw and partially replace Improve Way.

Silent let’s play demonstration on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agyY25jVeGM

OSM forum thread

Some important notes for newcomers of this tool:

1) Main buttons for this plugin: Shift-Enter-Alt.

• Enter = finalize drawing (press it instead of last click if you connect end of line to the other way).

• Shift + mouse roller = undo/redo drawed points

• Alt = disable way justification mode. (!)

2) Do not make self overlapping of drawed line. If you press Enter during drawed line overlapping - drawed line totally dissappears instead become new way object on the map. This dissappearing may cause big done work loosing. (!) If you made overlapping, unroll it back using Shift + mouse roller. Overlapped line is gray, not overlapped line is red.

3) If you start and finish new line on the other existing way, FilletTools works in “Part of way redraw mode” (existing lines justification mode). In this mode on pressing Enter all existing way part between start and finish points will be deleted and changed by new drawed line. To skip this mode (for example if you add new multipolygone to the existing one, like scrub to forest), you must press Alt button once at any time during drawing new line. (!)

4) Using mouse roller without pressing Shift zooms your map view. Also, during new line drawing anytime you can use “Download map data in current view” button, so you can draw this line even outside of downloaded area.

The Current Representation of India’s International Boundaries on OpenStreetMap Is Unacceptable

The current representation of India’s international boundaries on OpenStreetMap is unacceptable.

Jammu & Kashmir, Ladakh, and Arunachal Pradesh are integral parts of India according to the official position of the Republic of India. Displaying a map that does not reflect India’s official boundaries creates confusion for users and undermines the reliability of your platform.

OpenStreetMap must immediately review and correct the representation of India’s boundaries or provide a clear public explanation, supported by its official mapping policy, explaining why the platform displays a different representation.

If OpenStreetMap is unwilling or unable to display India’s official map, it should clearly disclose that its map does not represent the official map of India in relevant jurisdictions. Continuing to present an alternative representation without clear disclosure is misleading to users.

Required Response

I expect OpenStreetMap to provide:

1. A formal explanation of the current boundary representation.
2. The official mapping policy governing the depiction of India’s international boundaries.
3. The data sources used to determine the current representation.
4. The corrective action OpenStreetMap intends to take, if any.
5. A timeline for addressing this issue or a clear justification for maintaining the current representation.

This issue requires immediate attention. I expect a formal response explaining the current representation, the policy behind it, and the action OpenStreetMap intends to take.

An inadvertent typo recently led me to a slightly alarming discovery. Omitting the “r” from www.openstreetmap.org took me to a website that definitely wasn’t OSM, and prompted me to download something quite suspicious-looking. Thankfully I have my browser set to “paranoid” mode so things went no further, but it still felt like a near miss.

Apologies if I’m re-alerting folks to a known issue (a perfunctory web search didn’t turn up anyone else flagging this), and I’m not expert enough to know if there’s any legal and effective way to stop the impostor, but hopefully this is at least a helpful reminder to type carefully and trust your gut if anything smells phishy :)

Hello OSM community!

I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on to map, analyze, and improve the data quality of places of worship across Saudi Arabia.

The website is live here: Saudi Places of Worship Map

One hot July evening ten years ago, I found my way to a bar somewhere near the Barbican in London and descended down the stairs into the basement space for the MapSwipe launch party. At the door I was handed my name sticker and asked to fill in the number of square kilometres I had already swiped on the app. I duly filled in my 597 sq km and joined the party.

MapSwipe is an open-source mobile app where you swipe through satellite imagery and help identify features. The app was created as part of the Missing Maps project to help solve a problem we had in the early days. Mappers like myself would be asked to map an area to help a humanitarian project but we would open task after task with very little in it to actually map. So, the simple, but genius, idea behind MapSwipe is what if volunteers could do a first pass through the area and pick out the features that need to be mapped; then this smaller area could be presented to mappers to trace the data and add it to OpenStreetMap.

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Midterm is here, so this is a proper writeup of what’s landed so far, how the pieces fit together, and what the second half looks like. If you just want the code: everything described here merged in #4106.

Quick context for new readers: Nominatim identifies every place with a single class/type pair derived from OSM tags. An object tagged both tourism=hotel and amenity=restaurant becomes two rows in the database. Admin boundaries need admin_level special-casing everywhere. And there’s no way to express “wheelchair accessible cafe” at all. This project adds a proper category system to fix that at the database level.

Here’s the state of things at the halfway mark.

the data model: ltree[]

Categories are stored as an ltree[] column on place and placex, indexed with GiST. Each category is a dot-separated hierarchical path:

{osm.amenity.restaurant, osm.tourism.hotel}

I benchmarked this against TEXT[] with GIN during community bonding on a full planet import (~3 days to set up, worth it). The TEXT[] approach is what Photon effectively does at the OpenSearch level: pre-expand every prefix at index time (osm.amenity.restaurant also stores osm.amenity) and match with array overlap. It works, but you pay storage for every prefix of every category on every row, and the expansion logic lives in application code.

ltree understands hierarchy natively:

-- all amenities: restaurants, cafes, bars, everything below
WHERE categories @> 'osm.amenity'::ltree

-- exact match
WHERE 'osm.amenity.restaurant'::ltree = ANY(categories)

-- multi-value alternation (waterway checks)
WHERE categories ~ 'osm.waterway.river|stream|canal|drain|ditch'::lquery

Less storage, less code, and the query planner gets a real index to work with.

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While field-testing an app I’m building for walking Public Rights of Way (MOROW), I found a real one. Chippenham parish path CHIP108, a legally recorded Byway Open to All Traffic, was mapped in OSM with highway=bridleway, ref=CHIP108, and a free-text note describing its BOAT status, but no designation= and no prow_ref=. Those are the two tags any PRoW-aware tool actually reads, so the path was rendering as an ordinary, unremarkable line. I fixed that one way directly (changeset 185555601), but the obvious next question was whether the same mistake, recording a council’s path reference under the generic ref= tag instead of prow_ref=, is a one-off or systematic.

Before building anything to find out, I went looking for prior art, and found it. Robert Whittaker’s UK PRoW toolkit (https://osm.mathmos.net/prow/) already does this properly, county by county, comparing OSM against official Definitive Map data and generating per-parish tagging-error reports with real way IDs ready to work through. For Wiltshire alone: 8,354 recorded rights of way, only 58% carrying designation=, only 24% carrying prow_ref=. That’s roughly 4,450 km of Wiltshire’s legal PRoW network without a prow_ref tag, a scale question the tool had already answered, far beyond anything I’d have worked out from scratch.

CHIP108 itself doesn’t appear on either of Wiltshire’s error lists, most likely because the detection starts from ways already carrying some PRoW tag and checks the other; CHIP108 had neither. I’ve asked on Robert’s forum thread (https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/roberts-openstreetmap- stuff-osm-mathmos-net/112981) whether that’s a known gap or something worth extending for.

Testing the fix workflow

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Like much of the web, OSM has been struggling with bots downloading rendered maps, in our case declining to use our planet dumps to get what they want.

I therefore make a suggestion: give suspected scrapers a poisoned version of the map, for instance it could have scrambled POIs, or perhaps roads named after villains. We can then point out the source of the resulting contamination as it goes public.

For a while, the “Dienst Mobilteit van Antwerpen” (Department of Mobility of the Province of Antwerp) wanted to have (libre) streetview imagery, especially of the Belgian “cycle highways” - a type of cycling network in Belgium.

Mapillary and Panoramax are - of course - a part of their solution.

But how to actually take the pictures? It requires someone travelling along all the cycle paths.

This is where the “groendienst” (the department of Parks + greenery) comes in. They are cycling along all the cyclepaths, to make an inventory of all the invasive species. A special cargo bike is equiped with a special camera to scan the greenery and to automatically detect those invasive species.

The Mobility Department then asked to also install a GoPro on this cargo bike. And just like that, for practically no extra cost, they have streetview imagery!

You can see the cargo bike (parked in their parking garage) here

Singapore has about 2,300 playgrounds in OSM (leisure=playground), but no easy way for a parent to answer the practical question: is this one any good for my kid, today?

So I built PlaySG (https://playsg.sg): a free MapLibre GL map of every playground in the country, refreshed weekly via Overpass. On top of the OSM base it layers AI-read photo tags (shade, equipment, age fit), Google names and ratings where they exist, live NEA weather and haze, the nearest MRT station, and first-party reviews from parents. No ads, no accounts.

A couple of things I learned along the way: tag coverage is sparser than you’d expect — only ~180 of the ~2,290 OSM playgrounds carry a name, and indoor/wheelchair tags are rarer still, which is exactly why the photo-reading layer earns its keep. On the bright side, the weekly Overpass diff regularly catches brand-new playgrounds within days of new estates opening, which still feels a little magical.

Every playground links back to its source object on osm.org, and the About page credits ODbL. Feedback from Singapore mappers is very welcome — especially wrongly-tagged playgrounds, which the app makes easy to spot (and then fix at the source).

Today marks exactly one year since I started making changes to the map of Korea using openstreetmap.

my projects: 제주시 원도심 * 영흥면 * 거북섬 * 제부도 * 대부동 * 영종도 and 자운대

During this time, I’ve met many talented people, participated in many projects that will benefit people for decades to come, and of course (how could I not?), I’ve also satisfied my ego with athletic achievements. Mapping is a great hobby for people like me who can never get enough of new data. Every day of mapping brings new knowledge, and with it, new emotions.

I’ve heard a lot of opinions this year. That mapping is about freedom. That mapping is about community. That mapping is about the environment in which a person lives. Perhaps all of this, and more, is completely true. But for me personally, mapping is about knowledge, data, and education. It’s like having a sweet tooth and finding a bottomless sea of ​​sugar. It’s like finding a beach where diamonds are scattered right under your feet.

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this morning, i wanted to find an important manuscript in my archive for work purposes.

while digging through the archive, i found this thing.

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Just finished a second pass of my hometown. Redid a lot of my shoddier early mapping and reviewed every TIGER import street. Now working on TIGER review outside of the city and some wetlands mapping for the time being.

Last September I wrote about a concept where instead of hand-listing 15–30 recycling:* tags on every packaging container, the user could just pick the container’s colour and let the editor auto-add the right tags. Well, now the concept has become a working prototype.

Estonia’s container colours try to follow the Danish standard: paper blue, glass green, metal/plastic packaging yellow. Other countries and regions use different colours, but across EU paper, glass and packaging have surprisingly consistent colouring.

Source: European Commission, “Harmonising waste-sorting labels across the EU” (2023).

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Clearance: Quality filter for OpenStreetMap replication

Clearance is a free software tool for controlling the quality of OpenStreetMap replication diffs. It tracks thematic and territorial edits to OSM and keeps replication extracts (extracts, diffs, and a local Overpass API) up to date.

Instead of trusting every incoming change, Clearance evaluates edits against configurable quality rules based on OSM tags, metadata, geometry and changeset properties. Compliant changes, at object level, pass through automatically. Suspect ones are retained rather than applied. Retained data must either be fixed directly in OSM or approved manually. All data contributions are made only in OSM itself. Reviewing and fixing suspect changes is done collaboratively by the team responsible for a given theme and region.

Because it uses standard OpenStreetMap ecosystem formats for both input and output, Clearance integrates seamlessly into existing OSM data reusers workflows, while providing greater confidence in the consumed data. It is used to filter and review changes on thematic contributions such as tourism POIs across France, or road and emergency access points in Spain.

How Clearance addresses this problem

Clearance imports an initial OSM PBF extract, then checks every incoming change against configurable quality rules. Changes that meet the rules are applied automatically to the replicated database, while suspect changes are held back. Quarantined changes must then be fixed directly in OSM or manually approved by reviewers. After each update, previously held objects are re-evaluated, so a change is released automatically once it no longer fails the rules.

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In July 2026, I decided to return to OpenStreetMap after nearly four years. This project is more than just mapping for me—it is a personal journey to build a detailed digital representation of my hometown, Taiping. My current focus is the Heritage Zone, where I hope to refine every building footprint and individual block with the best accuracy possible. If you’re a fellow mapper or a Taiping resident, your contributions are always appreciated. Feel free to add shop lot numbers, business names, amenities, or any other local knowledge that helps make the map more complete and useful for everyone.

About three years ago, I had given a talk to some folks at the Irish Wheelchair Association in Kilkenny about the history of Kilkenny. They wanted me to do that again, but I thought that giving the same talk would be boring and asked whether I could talk about mapping accessibility instead. They were open to the idea, so I did that. I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell them about OpenStreetMap, but also to get some input from them about what else we could map.

In preparation for the talk, I created an “accessibility” preset in StreetComplete with quests all to do with wheelchair and visually impaired mapping, including the surface quest, because I figured that would be important for the routing services for wheelchairs. I surveyed quite a bit in Kilkenny city centre to get an idea of what the situation in town is.

I’ve recorded a video with the same slides I used for the talk which you can watch on YouTube (proof-read English and German subtitles available).

Additional quests for StreetComplete that I came up either by myself or with their help are (They’re also in the video, but it’s handy to have them listed here.):

• Is this ATM wheelchair accessible?
• Is this vending machine accessible?
• Is payment in this shop/ restaurant wheelchair accessible? (They said that sometimes the payment terminals are fixed in place too high up on a counter.)

After the talk, one of the facilitators told me about an upcoming audit walk in Kilkenny (on the 24th of July) to assess accessibility. So I got in contact with them to tell them about wheelmap.org and sent them a link to the video, so they don’t audit things I have already surveyed.

I used two overpass-turbo queries in the talk/ video to show some of the data that can be extracted from OSM:

• shops with the wheelchair key, colour-coded by accessibility (which is similar to wheelmap, but the data can be exported)
• steps and ramps, colour-coded by the ramp key (yes/ no/ separate/ no data)

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📊 First changeset review insights for Andhra Pradesh, India

• 🙋‍♂️ Review Requests: 32% of newcomers requested a review of their first changeset.
• ✨ Technical Quality: 32% of a newcomer’s very first edits are completely free of technical errors.
• ⚠️ Low-Severity Issues: 49% of changesets have low serverity errors like abbreviation issues or duplicate node-way geometries

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💡 Localized, faster community validation workflows are essential to support mapping talent.

About 450 editors join OpenStreetMap and contribute their first edit everyday based on a study for the year 2023.¹ Despite diverse OSM review tools and processes, there were few studies about OSM new editor data quality at country level.² Very little is known about their contribution quality and persistence at province level. This need was identified in the first ever desk analysis of State of the map for Andhra Pradesh in 2025. Even attempting to statistically analyze is not easy, given the need to query databases with specialized programs. OSM Changeset Analyser(OSMCha) is a very good tool for reviews. Using OSMCha and OSM APIs, I built a small Python Jupyter notebook program with help from Github Copilot. I applied this to understand the new editors contributions for Andhra Pradesh province of India for Q1, 2026. I found that 32% of first edit changesets are of good quality. 49% have low severity issues. Only 3% continue the edit activity in the subsequent 30 days after discussion on their first changesets. This program can be reused easily by modifying OSMCHA’s AOI filter identifier and OSMCHA user token.

Review process using OSMCha

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Not at all my work, but a place to record the work of Akash Wadhwani. They have just written a great piece on OpenStreetMap and the work of volunteers to map in support of disaster response.

I recommend you all read it, it’s a great advert for you.

https://sheets.works/data-viz/strangers-draw-maps